Hazelfaern Again

Go, now, and check out Luz: Girl of the Knowing! Then come back and tell me how it awesome it is

From the creatrix, Claudia Davila:

"LUZ was inspired by my first ever (self-published) comic book, SPOILED, a tale about the relationship between humankind and nature in relation to peak oil — the end of the petroleum era. Unlike the comic book, this web strip will contain practical skills to learn for when fossil energy ends. Our heroine is Luz, a girl on a mission to gather "the knowing": knowledge and experience about sustainable survival for humans, specifically in urban centers. Occasionally we’ll glimpse into Luz’s musings about the human condition and our connection, or lack thereof, to the natural world. I hope you enjoy this bi-weekly strip, while accumulating "the knowing" for yourself as the post-petroleum era approaches."

Admittedly, I read this book several months ago, yet it’s had such an impact on me I wanted to turn back time and review it here.

Plenty is the story of James and Alisa Smith, a Toronto couple who spend a year eating nothing but local foods. Their joint decision is set off by an impromptu gathered feast they share with friends while temporarily stuck in their summer retreat in the mountains. When they return back to their normal workaday life in the city, James, who’s documented some less than appealing facts about the sugar trade and other aspects of the global food supply for his day job, talks his girlfriend into attempting this experiment with him: to only eat foods that have traveled 100 miles or less from source to dinner plate.

And though James and Alisa do no planning whasoever — they discover that no one in their region grows wheat so they go without flour for nine months until stumbling over some rougue farmer in the area who not only grows wheat but mills it, too — the sincerity and tenacity of this couple makes for an absorbing story.

The two are talented writers who take turns narrating chapter by chapter. They talk about the changes that have occurred in their region from the early 1900’s to the present, they talk about the challenges they faced with this diet, living in an apartment in a big city, trying to work with local foods while honoring their previous commitment to a strict vegetarianism in which they eat no meat, dairy or eggs (but do eat fish — to my mind, their definition of vegetarian is a little loose to begin with and becomes progressively less strict through the book) yet the whole of the book culminates in an invitation to join them in their adventure.

Local eating has an immediate impact on the environment through reducing carbon emissions from lengthy transportation (most foods travel a minimum of 3,000 miles from field to plate). It also helps to keep communities interconnected — just consider that your average customer has 10 times as many conversations at the local Farmer’s Market as at the local big box supermarket. Farmer’s Markets help ensure that farmers and their help receive a living wage and relatedly this helps to reduce our need for cheap and frequently illegal labor — which means local foods may help us with the security of our borders.

I can’t resist pointing out, however, the difference between the two versions of this book that were released in Canada and in the US. The Canadian version is a straightforward description of what this book is about. The US version, on the other hand, is almost a plea before the reader can look any further — "Bear in mind that we have plenty right now — this book is not about depriviation! Here, look at this big juicy tomato!" And it really isn’t about deprivation. It’s about an  awareness that will hopefully lead to revitilization.

At least it certainly has been for me. A few things I’ve discovered along the way: our two local Farmer’s Markets, the Old Guilford Mill which was originally built in  1767 and  not only currently makes local flours, grits, dried fruits, and baking mixes but also supplies it’s own power, as well as Local Harvest which connects individuals to local farmers and CSA programs and Slow Foods the organization which will supply any interested visitor with information about their own regional resources.
 

Herland, a nearly-lost feminist Utopian novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a hundred years later, is still an absolute romp.

The nut-shell synopsis:

The era is Victorian. Three gallavanting, adventurous men, one with a small fortune, a gadget collection and an ego that will remind future generations of James Bond minus the day job, stumble upon a lost nation composed entirely of women that the trio cheekily nickname Herland. Herland  was suddenly cut off from the rest of human civilization over a thousand years prior in the midst of a civil insurrection and a landslide that deprived the early city-state of it’s men. Those first women managed to survive when one of the women experienced spontaneous parthenogenesis, a literal virgin birth. And Voila, the world is gifted with a true Mother Country.

This is heady material written by a real Victorian feminist agitator (who also ran her own newspaper and authored several other critical texts). Yet it’s also a comedy written in the classic satirical style of Enlightenment writers like Voltaire and Jonathon Swift.

Only here, as opposed to using a naive and wide-eyed outsider along the lines of Voltaire’s Candide or the Ingenue, Gilman has created a whole nation of naive and sincere outsider women to act as a cast of straight-ladies who ask disturbing and only somewhat artless questions of our visiting Victorian gentlemen. For instance, if women shouldn’t work why is it that, in the outside world, over 3/4’s of the female population are employeed in paying labor? Is poverty meant to be a statement on individual worth? Who does marriage benefit and what is it’s true purpose? There are real comic gems in our explorer-narrator’s hapless responses.

But the most intriguing questions Gilman asks are the ones she never actually puts into words — what would happen to our world if we valued nurturing over competition or insight over personality?

Direct Action is the highly entertaining, narrative quasi-fictional history of the Livermore Action Group, or LAG, a highly prolific anti-nuclear political collective that gathered together in the early 80’s to protest Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, specifically, and a laissez-faiere culture that could support a weapons technology with the capacity to obliterate life-as-we-know-it, in general.

I have to admit I’m still fascinated, weeks later, with the process of Consensus decision-making, the combination of radical spirituality with radical politics and the fact that the rag-tag group of vastly disparate individuals described in this book managed to work together as diligently and loyally as they did.

Lavishly illustrated with a bit of eye candy on every page or so, the novel was a quick and delicious read even at 700 pages+.

(I have to admit, however, that since I was carrying this book in my pack to and from work while using my bicycle for transit, I was really glad when I reached the end!)

Ever since I read a few lines about FDR’s influential appointee to the New York State Power Authority, Leland Olds, and then later, a few words about E.F Shumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of liberal economics — not something I’ve heard much about.

Which is why I jumped on Deep Economy the moment I found it in my local library’s collection.

Admittedly, Deep Economy is not a lesson in economics — at least, not in the fashion of tedia which you might apply to your tax return. It is, however, a fascinating overview of the ways in which the US economy and, more specifically, our beliefs about that economy and the imperative of economic growth, intersect with the health of the planet, the viability of our communities and the elusive nature of human happiness.

In that sense, Deep Economy picks up the threads and interweaves the philosophies of Deep Ecology, the Local Foods movement and what is shaping up to be the Local Community movement into one decisive and pondersome whole.

Paired with another book I’m currently reading, Your Money or Your Life, it’s almost enough to usher in the new Age of Sincerity.

So I spent an hour this afternoon blogging about my most recent reading adventure when an auto-update shut down my browser and killed my fresh post.

Bah! Bugger it. What I’d really like to do is start a tradition of book-recommendation for my blog, preferably one that doesn’t seriously stress me out. You see, I may not be into spending an hour every other day cross-anylizing my insights and deeper preferences over a given tome, but I can spend a few minutes cobbling a picture of what I’m reading into an entry window, if nothing else but for future reference (and a slightly shadow way to keep my blog freshly updated, ha).

SO! Rather than giving the deep post-feminist insights I was originally prepping for this space, I’ll give you a spectrum in pictures of what I’ve been reading lately — comments possible at a later date.

This is the rather random bit of mail that just made my day. You see, about a week ago I was doing some reading at VRF on Adam Durand, the activist who was recently sentenced for the part he played in filming undercover footage of a Wegman’s warehouse in upstate New York. Adam’s not only an active vegan with a conscience, he’s also a graphic designer who once contributed comics to the now defunct vegan zine, The Green Goat.

You’ll notice, if you clicked on that last link, that the front page doesn’t go anywhere. You simply get a nice picture of a green goat and a web address. So I asked around at VRF as to whatever happened to the zine. The answer shouldn’t have suprised me: like many zines, it burst onto the scene and folded not that long thereafter. Such is the way of the zine.

But Dave Dandelion, the wuvvable webmaster at VRF, just happened to have an old directory of a back issue which he posted as a PDF file. I spent a happy 20 minutes ogling some old stories written by a collective of vegans with whom I share the kind of tenuous, here-now-gone connection this worldwideweb easily affords.

I suppose that’s something that intrigues me. As easy as a web page, a username, a blog, a flckr account, or a zine are to produce, they’re just as easily abondoned. Many of them remain obscure and when they become relics they exist as the shell of a need which has transformed, evolved into something else, drifted elsewhere.

It’s easy to see the internet as a disembodied space of pure possibility. I suppose that’s why it feels like such a magic trick when it produces something. A relationship built of little more than text and shared ideas can sometimes result in something tangible, and when that’s happened, when I’ve recieved snail mail from my ether based friends, it always feels as though someon’s just pulled a coin or two from behind my ear.

Which is why I was delighted when I found Dave had decided to spontaneously send me a couple of old copies of The Green Goat he happened to have lying around. Just because.

The articles in the back issues of The Green Goat speak of possibilities — what might have been and what could be. They’re full of ideas, not just about how I can change my diet, recreate a cheeseless cheese, or redecorate my apartment compassionately. They showcase possibilities in how we can communicate, with humor or spleen, openly or satiricly, with polish and poise, or sometimes, just straight off the cuff.

I was intrigued by the conceit of Mike the Vegan’s Dog Farming story. I can’t promise you I won’t borrow the basic idea, someday. I wish I had an ongoing resource for The Thrust Reports. I wish Dave Dandelion DandyLion Dandy wrote more, busy as he is with websites and meetups and EarthSave and his dayjob.

But most of all, I was simply intrigued and delighted with this snapshot and the tenuous bubble of discovery that came along with it, as though the forest  breaks, and suddenly a clearing…

An excellent video, including a guest appearance from Richard D. Dryer, the man who coined the term speciesism.

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This has got to be one of my favorite Bizarro cartoons, yet.

Dan Pirraro, the quirky, funny, vegan cartoonist who pens the Bizarro quips and images has a whole slew of hillarious cartoons in his portfolio, a few videos and a standup comedy/puppet theater/musical tour called the Bizarro Baloney Show

How could you not love this man’s sense of humor? 

A couple of days ago I stumbled across a rather interesting (if somewhat inflammatory) article by a Dr. Micheal A. Fox, titled Deep and Shallow Vegetarianism and Animal Rights.

Dr. Fox’s premise, I think, is a litle confused, considering that he makes quite a few points about animal rights, animal agriculture and human/other animal symbiosis, in the interest of examining what he qualifies as a difference between "deep" and "shallow" vegetarians/vegans (that’s veg*ns, for those in the know) and "deep" and "shallow" animal rightists.

In all reality, what Dr. Fox is arguing towards is not an examined view of animal rights or vegetarianism, but a promtion of animal welfarism and the notion that, at core, a veg*n diet is a laudible, individual choice, mainly fueled by a Western society in which we base our identities, to an excessive extent, on what we consume.

What’s the difference, you ask? Well, the basic premise of animal rights philosophy is that all animals have the fundamental right to exist for their own reasons, free of the classification of property. Extending this notion outwards, animal rightists believe that it is unethical to use animals as a resource for food, clothing, experimentation or entertainment.  Animal welfarists, on the other hand, have no problem with the idea of animal use and simply strive to create or enforce laws and measures which ensure that the animals humans *do* use are not kept or treated inhumanely. Animal welfarists promote free-range meat, milk and eggs, while animal rightists believe that terms like "free range" simply cloud a fundamental issue — that animals raised for human interest will almost always be sent to slaughter at the point at which they outlive their usefulness. It’s hard for many and most animal rightists to see the compassion and humanity in that.

The bulk of Dr. Fox’s essay is spent musing over the starvation of large herds of sacred cows in India. Dr. Fox makes a point that he considers it unreasonable for any person who claims to have an interest in the well-being of their fellow earthlings to dismiss issues like quality of life and take a hard-line stance on euthenasia — and to a certain degree, I’d agree with him. But then Dr. Fox turns right around and points out that, considering the number of starving cows and starving people currently in India, the most ethical choice would be for the Hindus of that nation to give up their love of cows, to give up their vegetarianism, and start eating the poor, starving beasts.

Setting aside the most blatently troubling flaw in this argument, that we don’t eat euthenized animals, I’m baffled by the blind eye Dr. Fox is appearantly turning to his own line of reasoning. He argues that it’s good to keep animals because of the palliative effects of symbiosis. He argues that it’s ok to consume dairy and meat, because these are products of that symbiosis — and it would be wrong for veg*ns to put forth an ideology in which they might give off the impression that they’re somehow better than meat eaters, because this creates tension, strife and discord. And he argues that it’s wrong for vegetarians to engage in a kind of extension of cultural imperialism by claiming that their beliefs are universal rather than personal — and therefore may call into question the dairy and meat consumption of India. Yet Dr. Fox’s own line of reasoning leads to a conclusion in which Hindus should give up their reverence for cows and their vegetarianism — the same line of reasoning which he says justifies their dairy consumption in the first place!

But what bothers me most is the point Dr. Fox makes in another article on the same site, but doesn’t dare mention here — that the explosive growth of the cattle population in India is not the result of natural causes, it’s a direct result of the dairy industry, it’s a direct result of "overstocking" — it’s a direct result of human use.

What fascinates me most about this essay is that it almost explicity spells out the manner in which otherwise harmless ideas can grow into harmful ones. Most of all, it underlines the reasons why vegans and animal rightists promote abstinence from animal products — because there’s really no way for humans to maintain the kind of perpetually perfect management system that will always avoid surplus populations, that will always maintain a perfect balance between human and animal needs. And what we end up with, in the end, is a need to make those animals pay, with their own lives, for the mistakes of our own mismanagement. And when we become comfortable callously sending animals to the slaughterhouse, the welfare of those animals, in the brief time they have before they’re killed, seems irrelevant. How does this promote symbiosis? In the final analysis, most human-animal relationships wind up as a one way street.

I think that it’s far easier, in a certain sense, to promote a welfarist ideology than to promote an animal rights one — if only because animal welfarism does not really call into question our current ideas about animals. Animal welfarism doesn’t really require fundamental change — not in the way we produce and procure our food, not in the way we clothe ourselves, amuse ourselves and our families, and most critically of all, not in the way we approach the basic considerations of what constitutes quality of life and the humane treatment of living creatures.